Work continues on Chicago’s big dig — a massive tunnel and reservoir system to protect against storm-driven floods and sewer overflows. The project is expected to take more than a half-century. Now the Army Corps of Engineers is proposing a new tunnel and reservoir project that would nearly double the storage capacity of the one underway. It’s part of the agency’s plan to block Asian carp from invading Lake Michigan. Great Lakes advocates call it overkill.

Bulk of $15 billion plan not directly tied to stopping Asian carp

Army Corps' plan includes billions in water quality improvements

Chicago — It might be back to the drawing board for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' sweeping proposal to spend billions of dollars and 25 years to block an Asian carp invasion of the Great Lakes.

Buried within the Army Corps' 10,000-page study, and teased out in interviews with agency staff and legal experts, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel found that some controversial — if not inaccurate — interpretations of federal and state water laws are driving much of the project's astronomical costs and epic timeline.

A Watershed Moment

Since 2003, reporter Dan Egan has been reporting on threats facing the lakes. His groundbreaking work has shown the damage caused by invasive species and has laid out the bold steps that could be taken to restore and protect the world’s largest freshwater system. Go to section

The bulk of the Army Corps' $15 billion-plus estimate to restore the natural separation between the Lake Michigan and Mississippi River watersheds is yoked to projects that critics contend have little to do with directly stopping invasive species. They include some $12 billion to build things like new reservoirs, sewer tunnels and water treatment plants, as well as remove contaminated river sediments.

"The media has fixated on the $15 to $18 billion figure, and a number of politicians equate that with the price tag for (watershed) separation," said Tim Eder, executive director of the Great Lakes Commission, a body appointed by the region's governors and legislatures. "We don't accept that. We think that's based on flawed assumptions."

Chicago dug its canals more than a century ago to reverse the flow of its namesake river — and all the sewage discharged into it — so it flowed away from Lake Michigan and into the Mississippi River basin.

Governors and regional political leaders have grown increasingly concerned about these canals as global trade has made the waterways a man-made conduit for things like the jumbo carp from China, a fish-killing virus from the Atlantic and pipe-clogging mussels from the Caspian Sea to migrate between two of America's grandest watersheds.

This is how zebra and quagga mussels made their way out of the Great Lakes and into the Mississippi basin, which sprawls across 40% of the continental United States, from Montana to New York to Texas.

This is why 17 attorneys general — from such far-flung states as Arizona and West Virginia — demanded in 2011 that the Army Corps expedite the study on how to re-separate the watersheds.

And this is the reason all 16 U.S. senators from the eight Great Lakes states wrote the Army Corps in November urging it to move quickly to somehow close what's been dubbed an "invasive species super-highway."

The Army Corps originally planned to complete the $25 million study in 2015, but with Asian carp knocking on the door to the lakes, Congress demanded it be finished by the end of 2013.

The study contains eight scenarios to block the rapacious Asian carp species that threaten the lakes' ecology and multibillion dollar fishery.

The two options that have drawn the most attention call for restoring the natural divide between the two watersheds, because this would be the most effective way to halt the transfer of unwanted species — and because those options call for so much money and time.

"The assumptions used in the report create the impression that the corps thinks this situation is not urgent. Well it is," Eder said. "We need action and we don't have 25 years to wait."

'Inept' or 'biased'

Problems with the plan start with the Army Corps' definition of pollution.

First, the agency assumes that if Chicago's sanitary canals are dammed so that some portion of their flows enters Lake Michigan, the water leaving Chicago's sewage plants in that direction must be clean enough, essentially, to drink.

Advertisement

"The anti-degradation regulations under the Clean Water Act restrict the addition of significant pollutant loads" to Lake Michigan, explained Army Corps study leader Dave Wethington.

Then, because it would be wildly expensive — if not impossible — to use a sterilization process such as reverse osmosis to clean those sewer plant discharges to virtual drinking water quality, the agency is proposing a costly labyrinth of tunnels to continue whooshing the discharges away from the lake and into the Mississippi basin. Other tunnels would carry away from the lake the city's sewer overflows that currently go straight into the Mississippi-bound canals.

But if Chicago were allowed to discharge a portion of its highly treated, if not Perrier-pure, effluent into the lake — as do Milwaukee, Toronto, Detroit, Cleveland and every other major Great Lakes city — the project's cost would plummet.

Critics say what the Army Corps has ignored is that Asian carp are also an added pollution load, one that could be far worse for the lake than highly treated effluent. The Army Corps didn't factor the carp into any future pollution load equation, because the carp cannot be considered a type of pollution, Wethington said.

"The definition of 'pollutant' under the Clean Water Act does not include living organisms," he noted.

Nonsense, says Great Lakes water law expert and Wayne State University law professor Noah Hall.

"The corps' statement is flat-out wrong. The Clean Water Act definitely includes biological pollutants, and courts have consistently interpreted living and dead biota as pollutants," Hall said. "It really worries me that if the corps got a simple legal fact like this wrong in this process, they are either inept or so biased that it's very hard to trust their work."

The idea of invasive species as a pollutant is, in fact, the essence of a landmark lawsuit brought against the navigation industry more than a decade ago. A federal judge ruled in 2005 that ship owners must treat their invasive species-contaminated ballast water discharges like other pollutants under the Clean Water Act.

Critics say that in choosing not to view Asian carp as a pollutant, the Army Corps backed itself into a corner when considering a range of potential solutions to the canal problem.

Report Summary

This summary – conducted by the Great Lakes Commission and Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Cities Initiative – evaluates the physical and economic possibilities of separating the Great Lakes and Mississippi River basins by way of the Chicago Area Waterway System. The study was completed in 2012, two years before the Army Corps' report. Find the full study here.

Great Lakes Commission

"The assumption of 'no return flow' to the Great Lakes — no matter how clean and well treated — and the assumption that invasive species are not serious pollutants — no matter how dangerous — skews the analysis and limits the solutions to impractical and exorbitantly expensive proposals," said Henry Henderson, an attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council who previously served as Chicago's commissioner of environment.

"It's a deeply ironic — if not cynical — use of environmental principles to block an environmental solution."

David Ullrich is a former deputy regional director of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency who now leads a group representing Great Lakes mayors. His group partnered with the Great Lakes Commission in 2012 to fund their own study exploring how to repair the divide between Lake Michigan and the Mississippi basin that the Chicago canals destroyed more than a century ago.

That study concluded the project could be done for as little as $4.25 billion and that canal dams could be in place in a matter of years, not decades.

Ullrich said this separate study was ordered to ensure that the Army Corps, an agency whose focus is to keep cargo flowing and manage floodwaters, would give the concept of plugging the canals "fair consideration" in its own study.

Now that he has seen the Army Corps' conclusions, does Ullrich believe his own study got things wrong in estimating that the work could be done much quicker and cheaper than the Army Corps has stated?

"No," he said. "There is nothing here that convinces me of that."

Sewage treatment, Chicago-style

Every other Great Lakes city cleans its sewage in a multistage process that screens and settles out the solids, unleashes microbes to digest the leftover waste and then disinfects the water.

What comes out the end of those sewage treatment plant pipes is, under normal operating conditions, water clean enough to not harm Great Lakes beachgoers. It's also clean enough, with dilution, for the lakes to remain a drinking water source for Great Lakes cities from Toronto to Milwaukee to Duluth.

Chicago does things differently.

Chicago's canals have long allowed the city to get away with something that distinguishes it from major American cities. It does not disinfect its sewage.

It removes the big stuff, but sends bacteria-laden discharges back into the canals to let nature bake it out on its way toward New Orleans. (Under pressure from the federal government, Chicago has agreed to install disinfection equipment at two of its smaller treatment plants, but not at its largest plant, billed as the biggest in the world.)

Jim Ridgway is an environmental engineer and board chairman for the Alliance for the Great Lakes who worked on Ullrich's earlier study.

Separating the Basins

Unlike an earlier study by the Great Lakes Commission, the Army Corps' plan adds billions of dollars in water quality measures that critics say are not directly related to stopping an Asian carp invasion of Lake Michigan.

U.S. Army Corps of Engineers

He said the Army Corps' plan to stop the carp would not just subsidize an upgrade of Chicago's wastewater system to catch up with the rest of America, it would build a wastewater conveyance, storage and treatment system like no other on the planet.

He notes the Army Corps' proposed tunnel and reservoir system is designed to capture floods up to those triggered by a 500-year storm — a tempest so severe it would be expected to happen, as the name implies, maybe only twice every millennium. That is a standard far beyond what other cities' wastewater systems are designed to withstand.

The Army Corps' Wethington said the 500-year threshold reflects the fact that storms are getting bigger, and designing a barrier system that could fail under a lesser storm creates undue risk.

Just as frustrating to study critics is the proposal to capture sewer overflows in reservoirs and then pump that water back to treatment plants once the storm subsides. This is not driven by the need to protect the city's Lake Michigan drinking water supply. Remember, the Army Corps plan would use the tunnels to divert sewage treatment plant discharges and sewer overflows into the Mississippi basin.

This means the plan calls for spending decades to build a reservoir system that would help protect water quality in the Mississippi-bound canals. The same canals where right now, every day, Chicago flushes fecal-laced sewage discharges. The same canals where signs all along their banks warn the water is not safe for human contact.

Wethington said the proposed reservoirs are the result of consultations with state and federal water quality regulators, but he acknowledged these are just "assumptions," and ones that are subject to change.

"We took a conservative approach by designing the alternatives to be compliant with all applicable laws and regulations," he said "Further detailed design and discussions with relevant regulatory agencies may refine some of those assumptions."

Ridgway said the government might decide to build some projects, such as dams, to withstand a 500-year storm to avoid a catastrophic loss of life, but not to keep bacteria out of waterways.

"It is never used for water quality related stuff," he said. "Ever."

Some see the proposal to build the exceedingly expensive, time-consuming tunnels and reservoirs as evidence the Army Corps flubbed its responsibility to develop a long-term solution to the immediate Asian carp problem — perhaps intentionally.

"If you actually wanted to solve the problem," said Thom Cmar, an environmental attorney and Great Lakes advocate, "you would not have gone about it this way."

Another controversial assumption is the plan's approximately $2 billion cleanup of contaminated sediments in canal and river segments that lie east of the proposed dams, where water flows would be reversed toward Lake Michigan. The Army Corps maintains this is needed to meet water laws protecting Lake Michigan.

Critics say contaminated sediments in Chicago waterways are an environmental problem whichever way the water flows; their removal, like that of PCB-laden mud in the Fox River near Green Bay, is a separate issue from stopping the carp.

Yet another factor driving the project's astronomical cost is that Chicago would not be able to send sewer overflows into Lake Michigan.

All Great Lakes cities — even Chicago — use their lake as a safety valve to alleviate street flooding and basement backups by discharging untreated sewage straight into the lakes after big storms hit.

When exceptionally heavy rains hit Chicago, canal navigation locks along the lakeshore are opened to allow storm water and sewer overflows to spill into Lake Michigan instead of onto city streets and into basements, though even with this practice flooding remains a chronic problem in the Chicago area.

Since 2008, Chicago has discharged more than 31 billion gallons of sewage-laced wastewater back into the lake, according to records provided by the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago.

That's more than three times what Milwaukee dumped over the same time period.

Joel Brammeier, president of the Alliance for the Great Lakes, which has a history of suing Milwaukee over its sewer overflows into the lake, said it would be wonderful to eliminate sewer overflows, flooding and contaminated river sediments in Chicago.

But these things are not about stopping a fish.

"The obligation to solve these problems exists already," he said. "It is not created by the Asian carp."

Obama's 'solution' to the problem?

Report Summary

This summary provides an overview of the Army Corps' report, which cost $25 million, and evaluates the legislation, economics and technology behind completing the project. It also provides a brief description of each of the eight alternatives. Find the full report here.

U.S. Army Corps of Engineers

The Army Corps' study outlines eight long-term solutions to stop the migration of more than a dozen invasive species through the Chicago canals. Asian carp are the species everybody is worried about today, but in its study the agency acknowledged the canals are potential pathways for a long list of unwanted species.

The study, in fact, focused on 10 invasive species poised to use the canals to move out of the Great Lakes and into the Mississippi River basin. The list includes "VHS," a fish-killing viral disease that has infested the Great Lakes and could wreak havoc on the South's catfish farms — the very industry implicated in unleashing the Asian carp on North America.

Beyond the two study options that recommend fully plugging the canals, the corps offered lesser solutions — from continuing to rely on leaky electric fish barriers to using the canals' navigation locks as sterilization chambers.

The Army Corps acknowledges these alternatives don't provide the same protection as physical separation. That makes them nonstarters for many Great Lakes advocates, though some acknowledge sterilizing lock chambers might provide an interim solution until physical barriers are built.

The separation option that has attracted the most support from Great Lakes advocates calls for two dams several miles inland from the Lake Michigan shoreline. One dam would be located on the Sanitary and Ship Canal just southwest of downtown Chicago and the other would be built on the Calumet-Saginaw Channel that flows from Lake Michigan south of downtown.

The Great Lakes Commission offered a similar separation plan in 2012, though its estimated price tag was $4.25 billion. That price tag included about $1 billion to build cargo transfer stations to accommodate existing barge traffic. Even at more than three times the cost of the Great Lakes Commission plan, the Army Corps plan includes no cargo transfer facilities.

The 2012 commission plan would be so much cheaper because it doesn't call for building new reservoirs and instead relies on sewage treatment upgrades so discharges could flow into Lake Michigan. To deal with floodwaters, the Great Lakes Commission plan relies on Chicago's ongoing tunnel and reservoir construction project — known as TARP — that is designed to reduce sewer overflows and chronic floods, much as the deep tunnel system has worked in Milwaukee.

TARP is not expected to be completed until 2029.

To stop the carp and prevent flooding in the meantime, the Great Lakes Commission study calls for installing dams while keeping canal water flowing toward the Mississippi during big rains. These man-made waterfalls would allow the canals to continue to function much as they do today in terms of carrying away unwanted water.

This is a far from perfect solution because invaders from Lake Michigan could still spill over the dams and into the Mississippi. But it does provide a one-way barrier to stop the carp and other organisms from migrating up the Mississippi basin and into Great Lakes.

Once TARP tunnels and reservoirs are completed, along with the commission plan's sewage treatment upgrades, the dams would become a two-way barrier. Water on the Mississippi basin side of the divide would flow toward the Gulf of Mexico; water on the other side would flow into Lake Michigan — much like the natural hydrology of the area before Chicago's ditch diggers went to work.

The Army Corps' physical separation plan offers no such intermediate solution, despite its much longer development time, fueling critics' arguments that the agency's plan was designed, as much as anything, to provide ammunition for cargo shippers and others who don't want dams in their way.

"It could be read," said the Natural Resources Defense Council's Henderson, "as a laundry list of why this can't be done."

That appears to be exactly how it has been received by the Illinois Chamber of Commerce, which argues that the Army Corps' separation plan "is not economical, that it takes too long, and that it will not solve the issue."

"The wrong decision will negatively impact water quality and flood mitigation and result in irreparable economic damages to private sector interests while introducing billions of dollars in taxpayer obligations," said Benjamin Brockschmidt, director of federal affairs for the Illinois chamber.

It is not surprising that business interests have allied against the physical separation scenarios put forward by the Army Corps. Unlike the Great Lakes Commission plan that allowed for cargoes to pass over the barriers, the Army Corps' assumes cargoes will no longer flow freely on the canals.

The economic consequences of this are pegged in the Army Corps' study at $252 million annually. That's well above the $70 million figure put forward by two transportation consultants hired by Michigan as part of that state's ongoing lawsuit to force the Army Corps to do more to stop the carp.

The courts have so far denied Michigan's demand for faster action. Hall, the law professor, notes a big reason why is because the Army Corps was presumed to be working on a solution that will solve the problem.

"This process was the Obama administration's reason why the courts did not need to get involved," Hall said of the new plan. "This was the administration's solution."

Army Corps has own doubts

At the moment, all that is standing between the fish and Lake Michigan is an electric barrier on the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, about 35 miles downstream from Chicago's lakeshore.

The federal government has spent about $101 million to design and build the system. It now costs about $12 million to operate and maintain annually — nearly $33,000 per day. It was always intended to be a stopgap measure to stop the fish, but if the Army Corps' assumptions about physically separating the watersheds hold, it's going to have to do the job for a quarter-century or more. This is a big problem.

Federal studies using sonar cameras at the barrier last summer revealed fish as big as four inches routinely swimming right through the electrified swath of canal.

The Army Corps' response to this new information: More studies.

Henderson, of the Natural Resources Defense Council, said this is essence of the problem — nobody in the federal government is being held accountable for developing a plan with a "laser-like focus" that will actually stop the carp.

"It's in no one's job description," he said.

During a conference call with reporters on Jan. 6, the day the Army Corps' study was released, Wethington was asked whether the watersheds could be separated in time to prevent an invasion.

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporter Dan Egan investigated threats to the Great Lakes and the effectiveness of government efforts to protect them during a nine-month O'Brien Fellowship in Public Service Journalism through the Diederich College of Communication at Marquette University.

Great Lakes Coverage

Since 2003, reporter Dan Egan has been reporting on threats facing the lakes. His A Watershed Moment series has shown the damage caused by invasive species and has laid out the bold steps that could be taken to restore and protect the world’s largest freshwater system.Go to section.

While we strive for a lively and vigorous debate of the issues, we do not tolerate name calling, foul language or other inappropriate behavior. Please see our discussion guidelines and terms of use for more information.

While we do our best to moderate comments, we do not screen comments before they are posted. If you see a comment that violates our guidelines, please use the "Report Abuse" link to notify us of the issue.

GO EGAN GO!!!!!!!!!! When, and now, the solution is diversify, slow, stop the pollution stream that starts in Chicagoland, THERE IS NO PRICE THAT COULD BE SET AT AS OVERKILL, unless it hits the $$$1xx,000,000,000 limit!!!!!!!!!

Yeah, Taxpayer2, Nothing will likely be done that would be effective or meaningful. The damage is done and reversal is unlikely.

And the same is true for "global effects" of human activities. They ARE REAL. Lots of wasted gum flapping about all of these things. The FACT is that humans have done their level best to "mess up" too much.

On the brighter side, IF 'some people' would learn to THINK over the effects that are known to have occurred, just maybe this particular evolution of "humans" might wake up and at least try to avoid future FUs.

A make work plan, not restricted to just the corp either, strobe lights, water cannons, carp rayguns etc.. seem to provide long term biologist employment but does little to reduce the Asian Carp population. But it's just "guvmint money" right we gots lots a that. A biologist once said "regular pollution will decay, biological pollution more dangerous because it keeps reloading itself". This is a biological problem not an engineering problem. We have to control the source of the problem. The source of the problem is not the Illinois river, or any state. The problem is too many asian carp, the source of that is recruitment, (surviving the spawn to adult) adding/increasing numbers of said invasive species. Of the $200. million taxpayer dollars spent so far,our top asian carp expert says we can control asian carp with native predators, they have to be abundant, we can do that at a very low cost and predators will reduce asian carp (and other invasive species) numbers, barriers no. However the top priority is to refill lake Michigan with alewives, that eat the same zooplankton that asian carp eat, any increase in native fish/predators threatens the alewives, so not allowed. Recently the MDNR Fishery Div. bragged about a "state record" invasive white perch being caught in Muskegon lake. It is not a good thing to catch record size invasive species! Invasive white perch eat walleye eggs young perch and walleye and have overrun many lakes around the country. It's illegal in Indiana to not kill invasive white perch immediately! They're protected from predators because alewives are. Whether it's invasive white perch, or ruffe, or asian carp that overrun/dominate a lake, attack/eat/wipe out native fish spawn attempts the natural resource/native fishery is just as gone. WHAT coldwater species would be the best predator to use in the warm water areas baby asian carp will be in? As obvious as the answer is,it's the root cause of all our warm water invasive species problems!

We'll let companies pollute our water (WV, Gulf of Mexico, Jackson) and get away with it scott-free, but we'll bend over backwards to keep asian carp out of the great lakes for the benefit of anglers?!?!

Tax - uh there's a little firm called BP that has spent BILLIONS in fines to clean the Gulf and offset business loses. There's another tiny firm called Exxon that also spent Billions for it's spill in Alaska. The firm that caused the pollution in WV will be fined.

Name the last time that MKE's MMSD or the Chicago Sanitary District (funny name given the facts) paid a fine for their ongoing dumping?

I was one of the people who questioned the amount (on here). Common sense tells you it wouldn't take $15 billion to stop a fish. If they tried to pas all of this to the Asian carp people need to go to jail. There are laws against trying to rip of the government.

He campaigned on policies that would eradicate invasive species only to follow-up with study after study by the Army Corps of Engineers.

The bottom line is that fixing the problem would impact his political friends in Illinois.

So now, he finds his "perfect" solution. An overly complex one that will cost Americans, rather than Chicago, tens of billions of dollars. Where will that money be going? To the same union buddies he funneled the Interstate money to. Democrats are so obsessed with big business, that they don't see the billions in profits being made by these construction companies.

And while he's shown a total lack of leadership for the last five years, the Asian Carp now pose a greater threat than ever before. It won't be surprising if Canada sues the United States for something obama could have headed off five years aog. The cost of Chicago's sewer will seem trivial.

Thank you for all of your hard campaign work Barrack. And more lies and corrupt Illinois politics.